The history of cybernetics is a very interesting kind of story of strange bedfellas, where you have military, industrial, complex guys rubbing shoulders with CIA spooks and hippies and acid heads and artists, spiritual types of all sorts. That seems like a thing maybe to bring up in this context because future fossils itself is that kind of a place. You, Michael, being a scientific dude with artistic commitments or perhaps an artistic dude with scientific commitments depending on how you want to parse it out. And this conversation perhaps also promising to be that kind of a border kind of conversation.
The whole concept, the whole logic of cybernetics is that the governor, who, when Plato uses the word, must designate a person, an agent, a free agent who's choosing, who's making judgments, suddenly the governor is simply a component of the system, the automation of judgment. That's one way of framing cybernetics and what happens when you automate judgment? What is a self in the western, at least in the western ethos? What is a self but an agent that has accepted the responsibility and also assumed the authority to make judgments?
We're not making judgments anymore, then who's in control? It's not necessarily about control per se, it's about input and feedback, right? It's more of a relational ontology. And the conversation that I had with Eric Davis, the way he described it in that moment is it's both dystopian and utopian at the same time because you lose your sense of your selfhood coming back to that notion of the removal of the self, you lose that self and you become a collective.
Merry Christmas, future fossils. This is Michael Garfield welcoming you to episode 214, the podcast that explores our place and time. And as demonstrated in the Doctor Who and Aliens franchises, Ledrunner 2049 and Batman Returns, Christmas is a fruitful backdrop for the pondering of big ideas, a moment in which we can see with greater clarity than usual, the unity of everyday mundane humanity and transcendental cosmic matters. In other words, perfect timing for this episode's conversation about cybernetics and the philosophy of the weird with Megan Phipps, Phil Ford and JF Martell.
Megan studies new media at the University of Amsterdam and writes immensely trippy and insightful papers on topics like Brian Eno, Circuit Bending and Surveillance Capitalism. Phil is an author and musician who teaches musicology at IU Bloomington and infuses his curricula with the profundity he has polished through years of committed Zen practice. JF is an author, filmmaker and para-academic online course instructor in media studies and magic who runs Dungeons & Dragons campaigns on the side. Together, JF and Phil host the Delicious Weird Studies Podcast, every episode of which triggers in me the holy grail of podcast, effective listener programming, namely that I wish I were in the room and part of these discussions.
Luckily, I've had that opportunity before to talk about my writing on the material agency of Glass in our scientific era, and both of them have been on future fossils also, both alone and together. But getting all four of us on one call is a rare and precious thing, and now is the perfect moment to wrap about the emergence of the cybernetic era as a kind of newmanous event in human history, a divine invasion that transfigures us and forces us to think about which boundaries should melt away and which should stay where evolution learned to put them. You see, we live in an age of multilayer networks, and when our view of humankind transmogrifies from the static image of divine forms to a fluid wash of interweaving processes, the self becomes a metamorphic fugitive and a work of art. When everything's connected, politics is an aesthetic act, and art acquires moral force.
Advanced technologies have granted us godlike powers to reshape the world in our image, but life finds away, and there are always gremlins, aliens, dinosaurs and elves lurking latent in the tidy systems diagrams. The beauty of progress necessarily conceals the ugly externalities, the entropy exported in our efforts to arrange wild nature into an image of our lost garden. So what does cybernetics as a way of seeing change for us in terms of how we live? What does it mean to be human in an age of very lively, seemingly intelligent machines?
Before we dive along into this recording of a conversation so good, our first attempt was erased by Trickster Intervention. Let me express my thanks to everyone who has helped me and future fossils through a year of what I hope remains extraordinary challenge. This show is weird and obstinate in its refusal of clear definition. I follow my muses where they lead me and leave these discussions and soliloquies as fossils of a process of discovery and creativity, and staying true to this defies the logic of the market, which would have us classify ourselves as tidally as possible, so we are pre-chued for the algorithms that determine whether what we make is ever noticed by those over the horizon of organic peer-to-peer suggestion networks.
If you're listening, chances are, a friend told you about this show. I'd be surprised if you just found it randomly and definitely not because a sponsor amplified it. I started future fossils under pressure from my friends, but keep it going as a kind of Benedictine prayer. However, it might seem it's lonely work, but every now and then I find I've reached somebody where it counts.
I've inspired a major life change or just helped you orient yourselves amidst the wider movements of a transformation that once seemed chaotic and now seems symphonic. That's why I keep this going. Every single time I check my email to discover someone else finds value in my work and shows appreciation with Patreon, Substack, or Bandcamp. It makes my day and takes a little of the sting away from my ongoing balancing of kids and unemployment.
I'd like to make this work sustainable in 2024, but I'm still very far from that. So thank you, each and all, for everything you do to help me run this ultra marathon. New patrons I would like to thank include Ian Benoit, EGH 2128, Lynn Amores, Robert Cummings, Katie Teague, Slowdancing Fool, and Brian Mapes. Thank you, and thank you to everyone he chips in every month, or has left or will ever leave.
A good review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, or who shares this show with your friends, and a special thanks to Susie Lanza of Ahara Rasa Ghee for shipping the A-suite little care package with her delicious ghee as a gesture of appreciation for this show. She's not a sponsor, but I do endorse her work and recommend you check out iLoveGhee.com. Lastly, thanks to Newenautics.org for inviting me to join their advisory board and for their continued support of efforts to explore and map and understand the realms beyond. And now onto the main course.
Let's start somewhere else, in the trash stratum of a dirty manger, in the mess of our kinship and identity with Benon Hyun. In the revelation of our contiguous, nested, and modular interbeing, we begin our conversation, guided here by visitations from a higher realm in which communication and control are aspects of some secret third thing that transcends duality. The information age is one in which we cannot separate the bomb from the computer from the drug, and in this way, in spite of all the grimy cyberpunk and body horror of our media environment, the trillion-eyed panopticon the web became, appears to us like the Archangel Gabriel. Be not afraid, dear listeners, enjoy this awesome conversation, and enjoy your holidays.
I'm a messenger of the gods, but he's also a bullshitter and a thief. I wish we'd started recording five seconds before, because I'm really in the chat. I want to revisit the last thing that we said after our lost recording from last month. We talked about a lot of stuff.
We talked about the banal, the other materiality, Megan voted other and or banal. Yeah, but if Eric's isn't here, then maybe we rethink the categories. But we also talked about the actual impossible as well. Yeah.
Okay, folks, this is what happened. We met about a month ago, the four of us with Eric Davis, to have a fabulous conversation that suddenly disappeared from the recording buffer due to a gypsy-gitsy-gibber. And so now we are trying to reconstruct things like Memento or something. And I'm actually totally comfortable with allowing this new thing to emerge and go wherever pleases.
So I just want to thank you to Phil and JF for coming back on the show. And Megan, I'm delighted to have you on for what is supposedly the first time. And why don't we start by having you introduce yourself and framing your work with the weird and how you think about the weird and we can take it from there. Yeah, sure.
So my background is in liberal arts and sciences with kind of humanities major. So the kind of all philosophy of science and antiquity and all that kind of background as a primer. But more recently and more complex wise, I have background in media studies, mainly in new media and digital culture. I was just a lecturer at the University of Amsterdam lecturing in new media and digital culture.
And I recently left that position to start a PhD, which is something I've been working on for a while. It conceptually deals with kind of re-theorizing the mass in mass communication, but doing that through a collection and audio-visual collection at Amsterdam's I Film Museum, which is this artistic collection of an artist. Which ranges between experimental avant-garde film, liquid light slides, psychedelic shows, techno rave video culture. And I'm doing that PhD in Germany, the University and Phillips-Maverick University as well.
I'm also working with Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam on this notion of kind of ethics of weirdness. And that's where it is a little bit more of a concrete relation to talking about the weird. But I will say, I think in general, a lot of the overarching themes that I am dealing with deal with the weird in the kind of techno rave culture, these countercultures, that are the kind of things that are happening in the world. And so I think that the weirdness that emerges with technology throughout its kind of more recent lineage, and now trying to re-examine the values, the movement, the aesthetics, the perceptions that kind of exist within a little bit more of a philosophical framework.
And in terms of topics, I would say I mainly looking at perception. So the real and the virtual is something I'm really interested in, and the slash that kind of exists between that real and the virtual. So this kind of flat line. And how thick is that flat line?
Is it a zone? Is it fleshy? Is it flat-lining? What is it screen?
What is that slash between the real and the virtual? And how does that kind of play into logistics of perception? When the non-human, on the techno-human, the mindset, artificial, the natural, and then how does movement, relationality, and feedback play into that? So that's the best summary I can give at the moment.
That sounds like a great day job working on all that stuff. Very cool. It is. It's great.
It's great. And because since this last time we tried this, I have been wrapping up an album that seems to be synchronistically tied up in a couple things, both yells most recent episode of weird studies. On cybernetics and the tarot card temperance. And also you're teaching this course, JF, on art and AI for neural learning.
I think maybe that's where we can anchor things if you two gentlemen want to speak to some of the stuff that came up there, because when Megan brings up a slash in flatliners, you actually brought up flatliners in that episode. Right. That's true. I don't know if that's where you want to pop it open, but that's a thought.
Yeah. I wasn't expecting to think about that movie when we started recording that episode, but at some point it became pertinent. Flatliners is a film from the late 80s, early 90s about a group of, do you know the film, Megan? I do not know.
Okay. So it's worth checking out. Like I said in the show, the execution isn't great. For some reason the film is not very memorable.
Phil saw it and remembered it halfway through. I was like talking about it and strangely lame as a movie, but the idea I always thought was great. It's like a bunch of med students who bring themselves to the point of biological death, brain death, and then experience near death experiences, but then revive themselves. So they come back out and then they do trip reports on manufactured or artificially induced NDEs, which I thought was a pretty cool idea for a movie.
And of course they bring things back with them. And the reason I thought of that film is because in a sense that the demons or angels or both, right, that the creatures they bring back with them are taking the form of memories they've had or people from their past or events. And so there's a kind of a kind of a moshikarmic machinery that the film hints at that as we go through death suddenly angels, like angels using that term, I'm using that term like a quinus' sense, which is like celestial machines of some sort are activated to purge the soul and get it ready for the afterlife. So I've always been struck by the machinic quality of something like say the Tibetan Book of the Dead or the Egyptian Book of the Dead, where what you have is a kind of cybernetic process after death that purges and prepares or transforms the soul.
Think again about Plato's famous Menom's psychosis myth there at the end of the Republic, whereas his souls are put through this big cybernetic system and churned and turned into purge. So the idea of a celestial machine was something that emerged from our talk, but yeah, I think that's a great place to go towards. Phil, what was your takeaway from the San Frans? From talking about that card and particularly talking about flat letters.
I still can't remember anything about that movie except that it exists. I do actually vaguely remember that sense of some kind of karma. Like people go to the point of death and return trailing karma with them like a tin can tied to the backbone per of a car. But paper stuck at the bottom of their shoes.
Yes, exactly. Not sure. Not sure I think that's exactly how it works, but it's an interesting thought. How the hell do I know what happens when you die?
I'm sure it's very exciting. I don't know. The whole question of cybernetics to me is interesting from a historical point of view because, and we touched on this very lightly in the show, but something that I would mind returning to is the idea of cybernetics as a point of convergence for multiple intellectual and even artistic disciplines, even spiritual disciplines. There's a chapter in Eric Davis's book, Technosis.
It's entirely about cybernetics. I have a student, Sarah McDonough, who is doing a dissertation called performance in a more than human world, which is looking at musical performance as a cybernetic system. To some extent, reconstructing ideas about music performance that were cultivated in the KGN and post-Kage avant-garde in particularly in the United States after World War II, but also thinking about not only as a historical episode, but also as a way of thinking about performance that we as musicians or historians of music or indeed historians of any art form might want to think about again. The idea of the kind of spooky agencies that emerge in performance having some kind of theoretical basis or at least a theorizable basis in cybernetics.
That's where I get very interested in this subject. And even more abstractly, just that cybernetics is a place where people from widely different backgrounds can come together. Cybernetics is a number of historians have commented something of a border language, almost like a trade language or like, you know how English actually is the way it is because it was a trade language, compromise between different linguistic groups who would meet if only to exchange things with one another. And so you have English as very rationalized and simplified grammar as an artifact of that sort of social circumstance.
Likewise, cybernetics is one of those things. Actually, it's a little bit like kind of post-modern cultural theory in this respect, even though it's totally different. And it's particular, but that too has become something of a border language, especially within the humanities where people in different fields, for example, mind, musicology can find things to talk about with art historians or English professors or whatever. Cybernetics is another one of those sort of languages.
It allows people from different backgrounds to talk to one another. And as a result, the history of cybernetics is a very interesting kind of story of strange bedfellas where you have military industrial complex guys rubbing shoulders with CIA spooks and hippies and acid heads and artists, spiritual types of all sorts. That seems like a thing maybe to bring up in this context because future fossils itself is that kind of a place. You, Michael, being a scientific dude with artistic commitments or perhaps an artistic dude with scientific commitments depending on how you want to parse it out.
And this conversation perhaps also promising to be that kind of a border kind of conversation. Love it. Yeah, one of the things that came up in our Zero episode here is we're talking about capitalism and weirdness and how global weirding isn't really anything new. And a lot of other people get to that particular piece directly, but just this notion, I like the Zigman-Bowman's liquid modernity and this notion that capitalism has a dual loyalty to control, but also to transformation.
And those two things are at odds with one another. And this thing about the gak that my daughter's making at preschool, like the harder you squeeze it, the more it slips through your fingers. And yet we can't help but continue to open more and more rifts in our efforts to better know and control things. And so I've been reading Mitch Waldrips, The Dream Machine, which is about the history of computing.
And I loved, we were talking in the weird studies, Discord about this beautiful synchronicity that, JF, you describe this, the angelological stuff as a dream machine. And that there's this quote that I want to read two quotes that I've included in the liner notes of this album I'm working on because I feel like they set things off on the right foot. One is the popular quote from Rilka. It says, beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are barely able to endure in our odd because it serenely distains to annihilate us.
Each single angel is terrifying. And then Waldrips says, given the central role of communication in his new science, Norbert Wiener explained his first thought had been to derive a name from the Greek word for messenger. Unfortunately, that word was angelos, which in English had long since taken on a specific meaning of the messenger from God. Somehow a new science of angelics wasn't quite what he was looking for, so instead, said Wiener he decided to focus on the theme of control.
And so the point that you're making feel about the fact that cybernetics has become this sort of watering hole where all of these different people meet or you've got books like Fred Turner's counterculture to cyberculture, talking about Stuart Brand and the whole Earth catalog, and with the way that San Francisco hippie culture and the history of psychedelics and all this stuff can't be separated from the history of computing in America. And then you have our absent friend Eric Davis, the interview he gave to Ezra Klein in the New York Times, like things I've gotten to the point now where we need to call in Eric as an expert to explain to society why it's important to understand that all of the people making large language models are taking psychedelics. And there's just this, yeah, that's just the sort of yarn ball where I feel like we like to hear the three of you unpack things. If angels are in the machines.
If I can just jump in, I have a feeling that JF has a whole bunch of stuff on angels, but before we go there, I just want to say, however much creation and control can be mutually exclusive or mutually antagonistic dynamics within capitalism in artistic creation, you really can't separate them. And this is, I think, one reason why artists founds, and particularly kind of some of the Wilder and Willier precincts of the avant-garde found cybernetics to be so interesting because it allowed for, there's actually a really wonderful short essay by Brian Eno on this subject, allowing for systems that contain both creation and creation destruction and control. And these things figuring with one another dialectically or just cybernetically. Anyway, I just wanted to throw that out there.
And this is not really very important, but just because I was just teaching my Wagner Ring cycle class in the end university before coming on the mic here. It occurs to me, one of the big oppositions in Wagner's Ring cycle is Voton, King of the Gods, and his nemesis, Albrech, a Nebelom who steals the Rhine gold and fashions into a weapon, the ring, and Voton and Albrech are at odds throughout. And yet there are also mirrors of one another. And it's interesting, in fact, at one point, Voton refers to Albrech as dark, Albrech, and himself as light, Albrech.
So they're actually a dyad, reflections of one another, the same composite individual. And it's interesting that Albrech is all about control, Voton is all about creation. And so one way of understanding the way that control and creation have a role to play with one another as being antagonistic and yet mutually dependent, interdependent. As is often the case, it is mythology and story that can allow us to get a better purchase on seemingly incompatible ideas.
Anyway, I just wanted to throw that out there. Yeah, I'll just jump in because you sent in. And that's where I was going also with music because I've worked on a piece where I was looking at Brain and Cybernetics and looking at the way that he's been inspired by cybernetics in order to create his kind of generative ambient music. So it's like these kind of compositional seed-setty plants, so then in a way it ends up expanding the space of the mind and being able to distance yourself from the hyper-speed that's happening on a day-to-day basis.
And in this case, it's an emancipation when the self is being removed. And after I worked on this piece, I was reading Mark Fisher's Gothic materialism and Cybernetic theory fiction, and I started to question myself in terms of, yeah, maybe it's not so emancipatory. Maybe this is a dangerous trick that we're getting ourselves into. And maybe I'm still working on that, but I think that the main correlation between whether it's good or whether it's bad is one thing, but the main correlation is that there is a removal of the main correlation between the two.
And that can either be seen with the angelic, that can be seen with the flat line, you no longer exist. It can be a celestial machine. The self is not in the celestial machine. It's a non-human.
And it's just taking that self out, and whether you want to see that in a kind of Buddhist way and enlightening way, or you want to see that as a dangerous game that's being played with AI or the non-human agent that's malicious or maybe positive nature, there is no self or something like that. I think that's a key issue. And I definitely do think that that flat line or cybernetics is very linked, because if you think of that kind of cybernetic cycle, it's well-known that cybernetics wants to remain a constant cause. But there's always a crack, whether it's a gap or an asymptote, or it's never fully linking itself.
There's something that's splitting there, and that's maybe where a flat line can fit in this kind of cyclical nature. Very interesting, and I'm curious what JF has to say in terms of the angelic in that. Yeah, you moved into the territory I was hoping to get to. I love Phil's characterization of cybernetics as a kind of border town, like a most-isily from Star Wars, where people from, look very different from one another, like hammerhead types and squid head types can meet there and discuss some of the drink, perhaps.
And you have all these weird characters who find a kind of calm in parlance or lingo language to speak in cybernetics, which if we were to translate cybernetics into the Star Wars universe set of myth themes, we'd say that cybernetics is something like most-isily, like this kind of border town. What's the system at work in most-isily? Crime, right? It is, as Obi-Wan describes it, a hive of scum and villainy.
And so I think that the moral question, quite apart from the affordances and the obvious artistic aesthetic, political, economic affordances of a cybernetic system, right? Quite apart from incredible emancipatory power, emancipatory in whatever register you care to bring up in terms of civil rights, for example. You could say that this cybernetic niscis-ization, the meaning of a word of society, had something to do with the civil rights movement in the 60s. Or economic emancipation, liberating flows of capital.
Think of a classic move in the technicization of, for example, the economy was moved away from a gold standard into floating rates of exchange, which is very much a cybernetic system. Whereas you used to have a strong gold reserve that set the fixed standard, that determine the value of different currencies, what you have all of a sudden is an endless and permanent and ever fluctuating, metastable modulation of rates of exchange that stabilize one another. And what is essentially a metastable system, which means that it only works if it's always on the brink of collapsing, right? So you have the permanent crises, capitalism of the last 40 years being manufactured by a new system of control, which allows for the emancipation of flows of capital unlike anything we've ever seen, but also allows for the transmogrification of capital into speculative world.
Where money is referring to nothing but itself, where you have hedge funds and all that bullshit. And then you, so you can see that there's a danger in cybernetics. And it's like the ring of power. It provides immense affordances, but potentially at great moral costs.
So I love the way you brought in the idea of the self. And what happens to the self once it enters into a cybernetic arrangement with system, any system whatsoever, is that there is a kind of loss of self, right? And I think loss of self or loss of soul is a term that the anthropologist used to use for designating a particular pathological condition that people in animistics are using. And animistic societies or indigenous societies occasionally suffer from, which is that you need to get a grip on yourself.
And getting a grip on yourself means quartering off a part of yourself not allowing it to enter into relationships of feedback relationships where they can be entering to control and you're feeding yourself into the system. So I think that's a really interesting point. And it brings me to the thing I wanted to say before, which is that in the discourse on machines that I'm trying to develop with Phil and then in the class and elsewhere, it's that I really do want to adopt a kind of Northrop Fry conceptual apparatus, right? And the difference between a thing and its quote unquote, satanic parody, right?
I love the move that Wienerme is he wanted a name, a Greek name that evoked message, the message part of the cybernetic cycle. But unfortunately, the name was Angelos, which is lame as Philip pointed out. Nobody likes angels in the 20th century. They are Victorian that we want to leave behind.
And so he can't call this angelics. That's really ridiculous. So he goes to the other side and he says, control, not the message part, not the information part, but the control part. That will be defined it.
So what he does is he takes the Greek word Kubernetes, which means governor or steersman, but ironically, and this is the moment where I think Northrop Fry would call out a secret. And I'm like, Northrop Fry would call out a satanic parody. The whole concept, the whole logic of cybernetics is that the governor who when Plato uses the word must designate a person, an agent, a free agent who's choosing who's making judgments, suddenly the governor is simply a component of the system, the automation of judgment. That's one way of framing cybernetics.
And what happens when you automate judgment? What is a self in the Western, at least in the Western ethos, what is a self, but an agent that has accepted the responsibility and also assumed the authority to make judgments. If we're not making judgments anymore, then who's in control? And then it opens the doorway to all of the kind of automations that we've performed in our society, which are slowly now under the banner of global weirding, as Eric likes to call it.
They're showing that they are not just automations, but autonomizations, that the forces we've automated are now becoming autonomous. And then we have to wonder whether that's in our interests and how can we stop it? It's the moment where the source is the premise watches the rooms multiply, and there's no control anymore at all. And so, the role performs in an anti-adromia and turns into an absolute loss of control, or it gives way to chaos and all the other potential pitfalls that we're facing.
Yeah. Phil, I would like to hear you talk a little bit more about your students' pursuit of thinking about music through the lens of cybernetics, because this is something that's been really, I've been barking up the wrong tree, trying to frame things in this way in the festival world where I was playing most of my music for most of my career, but I want to read just a little clip from the one interview that I always include this clip in my press materials. The goal with this rig is to perform a cybernetic evolutionary worldview in which human subjectivity is understood as the behavior of entire ecosystems. And tell my audience that this music implicates us both as the near and far ends of a single event observing itself from multiple angles.
For cyber-acoustic music, then, the self, the human with guitar, hyphenated, human with guitar, that more traditional styles placed in the foreground becomes the fruiting body of a vast web of connections we don't ordinarily perceive. It's explicitly transhuman, even as it cherishes the warmth in the tradition of acoustic folk guitar by weaving the familiar into the tangled bank to quote Darwin about the bank of symbiotic relationships. And I just, again, I want to give a shout out to Eric Davis with whom I had a fabulous conversation about his love for synthesizer music. When I visited Bruce Damer's Digibar in a few years ago, and he showed me this analog computer that used to be owned by the University of Kansas, it's basically a modular synthesizer.
So that's the platform from which I would love to hear you riff on cybernetics and music and the selfhood of a world of synthesized music. I loved your use of the term fruiting body. The invocation of mushrooms, for one thing, seems unpointed. Notable example of a fruiting body with weird affordances, potentially.
But it's a nice metaphor for what goes on in the performance situation conceived cybernetically, where the human being, the individual artist, is seen as perhaps a privileged point in a set of relations. But by no means the only one for the sole determinant of a musical output. This is also something another of my doctoral advisees, Kerry O'Brien, who was actually on the show early when we did a show on Pauline Oliveris and Allveris's, an interesting person to talk about in this context. One of the things that cybernetics allows for in a field of music or field of art generally is putting pressure exactly on this notion of the self.
It's interesting, JF's comment, I'm talking it back to what JF just said, the idea of judgment being wielded no longer by a person, but by a mechanism or simply as a function of a system. And the sense of being, what is it to be a part of the system that is almost like being on an airplane and you open the cap and door and there's nobody sitting in the cockpit, that kind of feeling of no breaks, which I think is one of the fundamental affects of our age, the feeling of being in some kind of vehicle that's careening out of control. And where the idea of some human judgment controlling it doesn't seem necessarily to be a whole lot better because with that human being be, what Elon Musk or something, not to open that can. I know you guys love Elon Musk.
I don't even have an opinion. I didn't really want to go there. I thought I was being like, Elon Musk's t-shirt, but I'm not. Yeah, it's worth noting, though, that one of the things musicians were chasing is an entirely different affect.
I'm thinking back to a piece of Pauline Oliveris's that I have led many times, including at DC, in fact, at first recording the JF and I did at the Diverse Intelligence of Summer Institute, not this year, but the pre last year. There's actually a little bit of recording at the beginning where we led the participants in a performance of quote unquote performance, because is it really a performance when there's no audience and no performers and just a bunch of people all interacting, leaving that aside, we did a version of Pauline Oliveris's tuning meditation, which has a very simple system. The instructions, basically, each person involved is doing one of two things, usually an alternation. Thing one is you sing a long tone on a pitch of your choosing, and thing two is you sing a long tone or hum a long tone on a pitch that you're matching to somebody else in the room.
And you just alternate between that. And what happens is it's a very elegant and very simple system that builds a sonic output of these kind of slowly shifting chords that it sounds like it would be super dissonant, but for a number of reasons. I'm not going to go into it. There's actually a lot of, as Eno would put it, variety limiters that keep the resulting chords from sounding like massive like a cough in us.
But at the same time, also enough enhancements of variety or inducements to creation and change to make sonic output interesting. And so the consequence of this, though, to get to my point here, is what is it to be a part of that? That's why I always like to lead performance or sessions of the tuning meditation is because you can talk about what it is to be part of a cybernetic system, to be part of an emergent intelligence that includes and transcends your own, which becomes particularly palpable in things like strange collective movements of sympathy or intuition where we all know when to stop, like the piece always comes to natural and meant feeling. And the question is like, what is it to feel one's individual identity subsumed within this other emergent intelligence?
And that feeling was something that many artists were chasing, Pauline Oliveres being one of them, but there were many other figures who were after the same thing, for whom cybernetics is a critique of skin bag metaphysics, the assumption of an individual defined by a skin limit, right? And it was an ecstasy that people were chasing, like literal ecstasy and x-tases being outside of yourself, a feeling of, yeah, just ecstasy. That is also a legit feeling of cybernetics. And so when we're talking about contemporary society as a kind of out of control, sense, sorcerer's, a princess-type cybernetic machine, I think that's entirely to the point.
And there is an affect that goes with that, which is that feeling of, oh shit, no breaks. But it's worth remembering that there's also this other side of it that was a positive enough experience that a lot of people could really allow themselves to indulge in a kind of utopian way of thinking where a society of control would be a peaceful, harmonious society in which a kind of human ecstasy becomes impossible. This is like the techno-utokian flavor of a certain strain of late 60s, early 70s culture, like Richard Brautikens all watch over by machines of loving grace, which is often named checked in these contexts. So, yeah, I wanted to throw that in.
Yeah, it just, it reminds me of a couple things. And I think, first off the bat, I find that really interesting what you're saying about that kind of experience of the performer and the way that kind of situation is a cybernetic system, but it's not necessarily about control per se. It's about input and feedback, right? It's more of a relational ontology.
And the conversation that I had with Eric Dase, the way he described it in that moment is it's both dystopian and utopian at the same time, because you lose your sense of your selfhood coming back to that notion of the removal of the self, you lose that self and you become a collective, which on the one hand is liberating. And it's nice to have that kind of we are all in this together. But then that other flip side is there's that paranoia of control. If you don't have your sense of self, then maybe, you know, if you as the mass can be easily manipulated or controlled.
So, it's, then I think it's the same discussion we're having in terms of cybernetics being kind of dystopian or utopian. It's specifically that moment that it's both at the same time, which once again, what is that flat line then, right? We have dystopian and utopian. So, what is that slash?
How can we locate what that slash is? But yeah, really interesting. Brilliant. Well, I would, I'm just going to do this thing where I keep just citing things at length and then toss them back in the citation, imagine like a jewel spinning that just keeps multiplying facets.
I want to link this to a piece that Eric Wargo, our friend and time loop proponent, wrote about the space jockey in the Alien movie that the pilot of that crashed derelict ship upon which they find the eggs of the xenomorph. And he wrote this piece that's just such a profound meditation on cybernesis and on this term that comes from the biologist, Lynn Margulis, and Osimbiosis, which is the notion of, she looks back and she argued in the 60s that the complex cells were actually assemblages of once independently living bacteria. And at first she was laughed off, right? History has proven her.
Correct. It has had, there has been a consequence shift in evolutionary thinking about this kind of 19th century construction of the individual and evolution as a contest between individuals to something when you go to the Diverse Intelligence Summer Institute, for example, people are talking about evolution as something that's selecting on information bound units or agencies at a whole bunch of different levels at the same time, that it's like operating on everything at once. And so the individual we're talking about here and this is the worldview in which we can be comfortable talking about entire societies as individuals or we can be this. Michael Levin and Dan Dennett wrote this great piece for you on cognition all the way down, talking about the agency of individual cells.
So anyway, Borgo has this riff on the theme in Giger's artwork that all of the beings that you see, all the faces of the identifiable entities in his work are porturously interwoven, like imprisoned within machinery. And yet they seem like very peaceful, like Phil, you're talking about this sort of like, iconic weird state. And so Borgo's inquiring into this, we saw this relationship between the pleasure principle and addiction and between ex-dasis and torment. So if super intelligent machines prove capable of everything except consciousness in this in large sense, could our descendants become endo symbionts or sentient organelles in our technology?
Might future humans find that their only purpose and function within larger biomechanical constructs, including spaceships? Is there a useful capacity for feeling and perhaps higher consciousness or ecstasy? Is late capitalism itself already such a machine? And he says, it is beginning investigation begins to render the matrix's vision of humans immobilized in a virtual reality to capture their giissants weirdly realistic.
The last piece I'll second this is drawer poll egg, this author and futurist who was recently quoted in the Infinite Loops Podcasts talking about how he saw the future of the labor market being one in which assisted by automation, fewer and fewer people are producing more and more of the necessary goods and services in an economy. And so what's left for the vast majority of us is merely to contribute the data from our consumption that then steers this enormous machinery. The only thing left for us to do is in the VR pod and watch Netflix and then let them know what's getting us off. And I was like, this is less a statement about the future than it is about the conditions of industrialization that we're already living under, that particularly noxious and horrific thing is what the tossback is.
It reminds me of the end of Michelle Welbeck's novel The Elementary Particles, I think the title is in English, where at the end it ends in science fiction. So the story is mostly just happening in the 90s or and then suddenly it goes into the future. This is science fiction epilogue to it where humans have finally found a way to solve all the problems and that is to transform their bodies into the same types of skin that you'll find on a glance or clitoris, essentially where it'll become giant glance clitoris creatures who basically just respond with a sharp pleasure reaction to everything. And suddenly that is the way that we solve all the problems.
For Welbeck, this is a hilariously dystopian ending for him. And yet it is perfectly aligned with the logic of an ethos of dispersion, an ethos of the transcendence of the self, of the melting of the self into the machine, of becoming a placid, peaceful, enlightened face inside a machine of construct by a giger. My instincts tend to resist that sort of, I would say, one-sided utopianism, just because I believe the Buddha when he says that every jolt of pleasure next to see is also a charge of dullerous pain, of sorrow, to cry. It doesn't take much of an epistemic shift to listen in on a norji and then convince yourself that you're actually listening to the vocalizations of the subject of the words.
So for that reason, let go of the moral dimension of this whole problematic. And it's not because I am a reactionary who wants to resist cybernetics and whatever. It's more if we aren't to find some kind of synthesis between the admittedly caricature-esque depiction of Eastern spirituality as in hearing in the dissolution of the self, or the completely illusory nature of the self, on the one hand, and the Western ideal of the self as resurrected and made eternal on the other. Maybe if we want to engage in a bit of a dialectic here and try to find a synthesis, we might say that maybe what we're being called to develop is a concept of a contingent self, a self that is real, no less real for being contingent.
And that maybe the real threat that we're facing is that we will be tricked by these technologies, by these systems into believing that there is just nothing to the self, or by extension that there is nothing to the human, that the human is purely a kind of organelle, or maybe the human is just the sexual organ of the universe or something like that, the registers, pleasure, and pain. I believe that all of this drama, everything we're discussing right now, is unfolding in the imaginations at this moment of four humans, all of whom depend on a concept of the self to even begin engaging in this conversation. The fact that we're not interrupting one another means that we have at least that much investment in the idea of discrete selves. So I want to just try to find this ground where we can maintain our humanity in the face of these realizations.
I also want to speak to Phil's really important point about the ecstasy of these types of allietary systems, where art opens up onto the non-human, less than non-human. I think that's just part and parcel of art, all artistic processes. And one of the things that made Cage and Olyvero so necessary, or Duchampra that matters so necessary in the history of art, is because art had fallen into the trap of thinking itself as a purely communicative form of expression between individuals in an atomized society, that's the kind of 19th century vision of art, which many, 19th century artists were already challenging, but certainly was challenged in a massive way with these later movements in modernism. So my point is that, sorry, let me just try to find my back for a second.
My point is that, yes, the ecstasy that's afforded by these aesthetic practices that are deeply cybernetic in their methodologies is an important thing to keep in mind. And in fact, I don't think that the ideal of beauty can emerge at all without some aspect of that, that the beautiful, as Kant and Burke observed, that the beautiful in its ultimate sublime manifestation is necessarily a kind of loss of self, a kind of ecstasy, an ecstasy that an ecstasy. So there's something about that. So what Olyveros is chasing is the same beauty that Shakespeare is chasing, just in a different way, in a different register.
So cybernetics is too hard to, there's always been there, and maybe these modernists are actually just calling attention to something that's been going on along. Having said that, I think one of the most dangerous moves that artists made in the 20th century came in the form of dada and surrealism, which were movements explicitly aimed at eliminating the line between art and life. So that, for example, the ecstasy that Olyveros provides her collaborators with her musical pieces is re-envisioned as something that should govern society. And I think that the triumph of the society of control in late capitalism is the triumph of the dada movement.
I do think that we have, aestheticized our society, turned it into a kind of spectral spectacle, which I don't believe. I think there's a place for art and a place for losing yourself, and then there's a sistole diastole thing, where there's a place for recuperating the self, for waking up from the ecstasy. And I think that's opportunities for waking up to ourselves are less and less available in this spectacular culture that we now find ourselves in. Yeah, if I just follow up on that, I think it comes back again as well to this cybernetic theory fiction, and specifically this inorganic organic, because whether it's you're updating your body with technology or you're a giant in Holbex term, like a giant clitoris or something like that, this is an inorganic organic.
This is something that is not, did not start off as something organic in our world has become that, right? And a story that you just said reminded me of this quote where Mark Fisher is talking about neuromancer in relation to Freud's civilization and its discontent. He says, oh, he was talking about video drone. Sorry.
And where he says in video drone, Max's body is what may be a pointed and corrective reference to McGlue and some media organism. It is not extended, but in bad, you need it. And then he talks about you cannot penetrate something which already envelops you. So whether it's your VR headset or whether it's your addiction or something like that, I think we're struggling right now with this kind of body versus techno versus nature.
And that kind of comes back again to the cyberpunk philosophy that is reaped in biopolitics or body politics, where you have to basically spend your whole day trying to update something on your body. You need to get this kind of drug from this person around the corner on the street to get to have the memory that you need for the next few days or you're constantly having to upgrade your body. And I think in a sense, we already do that, right? We're disassociating from nature so much and we're situating ourselves in this techno world so much that it might just be the same thing.
It's like we have to spend our days giving ourselves nutrients or filling our creative souls or whatever it is, but the farther and farther we go to this kind of ignoring the body politics that are very blatantly an issue overall. We're just going to end up being addicted to whatever our body needs, whether that's a glass eye or a salad. It's a good point. It seems like a lot of auto poetic systems that were part of the human organism are now increasingly being exported onto technologies that then provide what the body, that's what a tool is, right?
The tool is brought to prosthesis. The difference in a tool in a machine is that a tool extends your body, a machine obsolesces your body, and then your body becomes dependent on replenishing itself from the machine. So for instance, memory, whereas people were once able to perform feats of memory that suggests some kind of a godlike intelligence to us today. The mnemonic palaces or people reciting home resilient and start to finish today.
We've largely exported our memory so that I can barely remember. I can't even remember my example. This is a problem because the real problem in this is that underneath the technium at the bottom level, we're still just biological creatures that need nutrients. So now the need for external feedback is like almost quadrupled.
We need much more. We need more prosthesis, more inputs from the outside. And that's the idea of the cyborg. But the cyborg at the bottom, at the end of the day, also needs to eat and to drink and to breathe air.
And so there's this uncomfortable thing where in a sense we're wanting to be something we're not. I'm reminded here of Steiner's idea of Lucifer and the sign in Steiner's cosmology. Lucifer wants to draw humans into ever more rarefied, ethereal realms against out of matter and this nostic kind of journey out of matter. But of course, this imaginal journey we take into the technium and is always just tethered to the simple fact that we have bodies and our bodies have needs.
And I don't know, just like the dangers for me tend to my imagination, that the dangers constantly tend to outweigh the promises. Yeah, likewise. And I will just say memory is, as Verillio would say, that would be going towards the automation and perception. And I think that these are two maybe venn diagrammed issues, but equally as important if our perception gets automated or our bodies get automated.
It's taking away something that is biological in us, coming back to what Michael was talking about, this idea of the biological systems and replenishing it with something that is automated. And for me, the automation and perception is quite terrifying. But yeah. I'd like to anchor this in something that I've been watching unfold on Twitter recently, where Sam Altman, the, what you call him?
Open AI. So of R.M. on in this diner kind of situation, yeah, that strangely child, like a friendly looking face of this mollock that was going on Twitter recently about how much he loves caffeine and how caffeine is the best drug. And then Andrew Gallimore, author of Alien Information Theory, the neuroscientist who worked with Rick Strosman to publish a protocol for intravenous DMT that allows for extended state DMT research.
Now, Andrew Gallimore was like intravenous DMT sounds terrifying. I'm sorry. Yeah. I know a bunch of people that have been mixed up in these studies, they're like legit psychonauts.
And it's interesting that this is we're finally moving out of a paradigm where psychedelic research is purely medical, like what's being allowed legally. No, in the United States is starting to move into more of the psychedelic and as research instrument, which strikes me as a whole lot more promising in terms of the scientific enterprise. But at any rate, like Gallimore's, Oh boy, Sam Altman, wait till you find out about DMT. And I'm sitting there thinking, yeah, but my God, can you imagine having to be on psychedelics to go to work?
That seems to me to be the world that we're flirting with here, where it's beyond microdosing, simply providing Silicon Valley entrepreneurs with a competitive advantage in ideation and into something about flow state management. This is the abyss I've been staring into for the last six years. And this gets us all the way back to the missing pieces of our last conversation where we were talking about the weird and the banal. And at what point, when like my buddies in Boulder, Colorado, who were like, man, I wish we'd were still illegal.
It's not cool anymore. But there's something about this that happened to me at the psychedelic science conference this year where I was like, Oh, like Eric wasn't even there, right? Like Eric and Bruce and a bunch of the old heads were just like, it's not my scene anymore. And I got there and I was like, yeah, I guess I don't feel a responsibility to be a part of the psychedelic movement anymore, or rather the underground has not actually become the thing.
Like what has happened is that there is still a psychedelic underground and those people feel marginalized from this movement now. So I guess like what I'm getting at is I'm curious about this piece about waking up from the ecstasy because this notion that we've got to download an app that allows us to unplug from Facebook or that we need to go to a float tank in order to find silence. It just seems like an escape strategy is actually just drawing us deeper into the gears. I will just say I think that intravenous DMT sounds like the movie flatline, the same kind of thing, trying to bring someone in.
Sorry, go on, sorry. Shit, I completely forgot what I was going to say. No. Just totally blanking.
Just ask chat GPT. Yeah, what was I thinking? Just now? Oh, yeah.
It's not going to go, oh, I have to say this and now it's completely and totally gone. You edit. Michael, what were you saying? Right?
You're going to edit this part out. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Why do I not trust you? Sure.
I did remember what I was going to say. Actually, we've already forgotten about this because the culture has moved on. But remember 10 years ago was the high watermark of corporate mindfulness. Remember that?
Remember how everybody, although our corporate overlords were telling us to meditate in the breakroom? That did not exactly work as planned. It didn't. Because either it doesn't work for shit if you're just broadly crudely instrumentalizing it.
It doesn't work, quote unquote, because the whole purpose is not, it's not instrumental logic. Zazan, which is a meditation that I'm familiar with, or insight meditation, these aren't wetware hacks. These aren't tricks for increasing your productivity. And if you decide you're going to turn them into that, what might just happen is you end up with a bunch of people who suddenly become more aware of the kind of bullshit you're putting them through.
People might actually wake up a little bit and say, this is stupid. People might get up off the cushion and say, I must change my life. And that's the last fucking thing our bosses want. Perhaps I am in a disadvantage here.
I am a psychedelic knife. I've never done acid or DMT or shrooms or what have you. One brief weird experience with Selvia Divinorum that basically all I got from that was, oh, the shit works, which I guess I could have guessed. Anyway, yeah, the shit will fuck you out.
So I don't know about, I don't know, maybe psychedelics are more bittable in a sense, like it's a, or apt to be turned into a kind of human potential technology. But I have my doubts. I don't know. I respect JF's through-going and pervasive pessimism on this topic.
And yet for some reason, I keep being pulled towards an optimistic belief that human beings, actually this might just be the thing that normally is really fucking annoying about human being, since it were lazy and stupid and self-seeking. Like all of these various sort of otheful and idle and given to all kinds of sins, all sorts of deadly sins. Maybe that's actually a good thing. All these things that make us unbittable or less bittable, even if you give us some kind of human potential maximization technique or something, we'll probably fuck it up.
Or end up doing something with it that will lead to perverse and completely unintended consequences. The thing that I keep hearing, and not just this conversation, but every conversation like it, is feeling the nearness of total control. One day they're going to come up with a cybernetic system that manages control so perfectly, that it will not allow even the minutest hairs breadth of room for any kind of escape, or even the possibility of cognitively coming to grips with what is happening to you. I love the idea that prevent that from happening is not our nobility, potential for great works, for great artistic and scientific insight, et cetera.
But actually the part of us that just wants to get drunk, run around and wake up on some guy's couch. You don't even know like how you got there. That perhaps is what we'll say humanity. When I did that, I woke up, I fell asleep in the yard at my friend's party in college, and they moved me inside and I woke up in a chair covered in 250 sugar bites.
So I lost my interest in that kind of... I love the idea of you the next day just resentfully counting your sugar bites. 249. I got a whole week to count them.
Oh man. I think it makes sense though, in a way, Phil, that you have the more optimistic side of it, because the way that people typically affiliate this kind of doomsday cybernetics is a negative stance on feedback, a negative stance on modulation. These are in a musical sense take on a very different meaning, and they have creativity in them, but maybe you have to be looking at those kinds of terms and that kind of framework from a musical standpoint. It's not going to seem as scary to you when you're hearing these kinds of words, because the agency, I guess, that you have in them.
But maybe other people don't experience them as well. I think it's also a matter of what I was saying earlier about the line, the data, want to erase. It's one thing to be a participant in an emergent creative event, having consented to it and knowing what you're doing. It's another if you're part of someone else's creative emergent event and you don't even know you're part of it.
The morality of art for me comes down to this, is that art is moral when it has a space to be completely amoral. Art serves a moral function or political function when it can occur in a culturally contrived space shim where it can engage in the most vile, the prividesis or immoralities, for instance. Shakespeare's Othello. So you've got Othello, and this goes back to what Phil was saying about the interdependence of the creative and the destructive, let's say, like with Votan and Albrecht.
So in Othello, you've got the Noble Othello, who is a person of color living in Europe, who has achieved a certain level of nobility and power and authority in his society, despite all the tribulations and challenges inherent in his strangerhood. And then you have Yago, who comes in for motives, no one can really decipher. I've never been satisfied with an explanation of Yago's evil. In a sense, he's the most evil of Shakespeare's characters because he has no motives other than to take Othello down.
So Yago is a very immoral evil person, but I love him because he exists in the space shim of an artwork, wherein I can observe evil so that I can recognize it, potentially, in the world. So I can use the symbolic machinery of Othello to perform analyses in my life. I don't want to meet Yago out in the world. I don't want Yago to be a part of the cybernetic system that governs my life.
I want the system that governs my life to be predicated, preferably in my opinion, on enlightenment principles. It consides of the kingdom events, where people are seen as ends of themselves, people are recognized as autonomous agents who can self-determine, who can make decisions for themselves, who are respected for who they are, for what they can offer. It doesn't seem to me like there's an obvious way of embracing a cybernetic civilization without giving up on these ideals. And so that's why, for me, art should be radically free and therefore radically separated from life.
It's a very subtle technology art that we created over the last few centuries. It's essentially replacing religion for good and for ill, and we have to be careful with that technology because if we let it out, if we let it out of its own, there are people out there in the IT world who see us as an art project and treat us as an art project. So the aestheticization of life as Benioh Mean Warren can have a very dark quality to it as well. I was just going to bring up any means lying about the aestheticization of politics being fascism, which is undoubtedly true.
At least it's not, I suppose I would say, a possible condition, but not necessarily a necessary condition for fascism or some kind of society of total control. But yeah, if you're treating people like they are brushstrokes in a canvas, notes in a composition, then there's nothing if I'm composing a piece of music. There's no moral force restraining my treatment of this note or that note. The idea that people could be treated as elements of a composition to be added or deleted on aesthetic grounds.
Clearly there is some degree to which Hitler's idea of a racially purified state was an aesthetic vision. Absolutely. That's to give us pause. I'm thinking of a conversation yesterday with Sam Arbusman, who's independent scholar.
He's like an in-house research scientist for Lux Capital. He's written a lot of really interesting stuff about computation and magic, and this is where we find our common geek. I was talking about him yesterday about this kind of stuff, and he pointed out that when I brought up Jeff Cripple and the way that Cripple was thinking about superheroes and why superheroes are so popular in culture right now, and the possibility that it has to do with us reckoning with our technology-granted prosthetic superpowers. He made the point that Lex Luthor is one of these people who have an aesthetic vision that it's progress.
He's like an Elon Musk character. He wants to be, and then Superman is from Kansas. He's really a force of stasis, like of keeping things in a homeostatic stability. He's trying to restore, which is why people hated the man of steel film.
It's because we see a Superman that's willing to destroy the city in order to save it, and it seemed out of character. But yeah, I don't know what I'm getting at here except that what's been on my mind a lot lately is this notion that innovation is not an evil unto itself, but is something that has become the content of religion for a certain group of technology minded people. We don't question it, and yet you've got on the other end of the de-growth movement, and I talked to Businesses Jeffery West and Montfort-Loude-Kler. But these two gentlemen who have been thinking about the Anthropocene for their entire careers and about the way that physical scaling laws determine economic growth and the growth of cities and so on.
And they have come to, and Jeffery in particular, what he's come to his old age after decades of this is two things. And maybe this is the last thing I want to say and let y'all riff on it is he sees one that innovation cannot solve the problems that have been created by innovation. And he's got a physics argument that we end up just accelerating this thing until we can't make any sense of it whatsoever and it destroys us all. In the math, right, that's where it heads.
So what's going to stop us from doing this is what we've done is like a cancer cell. We have innovated our way out of all the regulatory checks on us, the negative feedback piece in cybernetics, which is that the steersman is not just like seeing how fast they can spin the wheel in one direction. They're trying to nudge with these tiny course directions onto the charting a course in a particular direction that's about a balance between things. And so what restores that balance?
Because it doesn't seem that the profit function is as interested in any way in that. And this is a very strange thing for someone of his Los Alamos Santa Fe Institute physicist to say, and he's aware of that. But he was like, basically, I think that we need a religious intervention, that we need something like a new axial era. We need figures in his imagination that can step forward in a budic or Christic way to provide a metaphysical framework that allows us to see beyond this sort of death cult.
And I'm curious. Can I speak to that? If that's waking up from a xdasis. Yeah.
I sympathize with that, but I do think we have that in art. We just don't know it. And we don't. And so the art is never the artist or doing their thing.
Of course, there are a lot of artists who lose their way or there are a lot of bad artists out there, whatever. But the point is, the good artists know what they're doing and doing the thing. That's why, for example, great artists so fricking fluffetic and so much more accurate and feeling out where we're going compared to statisticians or futurists or whatever. So there's a quote here in the clue and of course thought the same way.
He called art an early alarm system or an early distant warning system. Yeah, like the do line, just an early warning system, our array in northern Canada to let us know when the Russkies were coming. That's a metaphor for a lot. Yeah.
For artists and what art does and I have a quote here. This is from understanding media. So Mclewinn wrote quote, in this century as a compound called the artist the antenna of the race, art as radar acts as an early alarm system as it were enabling us to discover social and psychic targets in lots of time to prepare to cope with them. This concept of the arts as prophetic contrasts with the popular idea of them as near self expression.
He goes on a little later, art as a radar environment takes on the function of indispensable perceptual training rather than the role of a privileged diet for the elite. While the arts as radar feedback provided dynamic and changing corporate image. He's using the word corporate here in the Catholic theological sense, not the business sense, changing corporate image. Their purpose, the purpose of the arts may be not to enable us to change as technology does.
Right. The other forces enable us to change, but art finds us meaning and purpose, perhaps he says quote, rather in maintaining an even course toward permanent goals, even amidst the most disrupting innovations. So he's contrasting art to innovation in the sense that the purpose of art may be to enable us to keep our sights on permanent goals amidst flux and change. We have already discovered he ends the futility of changing our goals as we change our technologies.
This basically is turning art into the basis of a kind of religious vision. If by religion we mean the establishment of permanent or transcendent goals that then help us be the Kubernetes who make the judgments as to where things are going or how we relate to the technologies and how we do it. So there's an implicit religiosity of art in McClueen's thought that I think would point to the possibility of a new kind of axial, let's say consciousness for lack of a better term, which would not be predicated upon the imposition of one of the available dogmas, but rather I think if I had to choose it, I would not be predicated upon the imposition of one of the other dogmas. So I think if I had to choose to name the object of this axial coming to grips with the real, I would call it radical mystery.
Radical mystery is not a dogma, I feed you. It's a simple fact. It's a fact that everyone can agree on. We don't know what we are.
We don't know why we're here. We don't know what anything is in itself. We are living in a radical mystery. The awareness of radical mystery, which I associate with the aesthetic experience as such, like Phil and I have always talked about this, great works of art confront you with radical mystery.
We're not the first to say that, not by a stretch. The idea is that the confrontation or coming to terms or coming face to face with radical mystery has an ennobling and humbling effect on the person. It humbles you to be shown that you don't know what the fuck you're talking about. And so in that kind of automatic humility, there may be the seeds of an ethos that would allow us to enter into more constructive, creative, and ultimately beneficial relations with our technologies and the forces that course through the whole soul.
I would agree with that dude that you would talk to. I can't remember his name. I agree with JF in terms of this radical mystery, but funnily enough, I would maybe somewhat disagree with the person you spoke to, Michael. Only to say that innovation isn't able to save innovation in a way I could agree, but I think it's more about remapping.
It doesn't necessarily have to be an innovation, but it's let's see what the elements are and remap them. I would say that's a really strong statement to just, or blanket statement to say religion will save us because what religion, right? That's like a very charged decision to make. And I also think maybe thinking about it more in terms of and have a critical view on religion, let's say we could make the argument that we're innovated to some extent, right?
But regardless if you completely take your own faith out of it. So then it becomes hypocritical to the statement that's being made. So maybe we could go back more to these kind of biological systems, more of a Michael Levin approach, something that's actually not, we're not innovating it. It's there.
It's in front of us. It's nature. And viewing that as a way to save us, which then goes into radical mystery again. But then we can also do this kind of on the other interpretation of the word cultural level.
We have our cultures, our human cultures, and then our cultures in a Petri dish. We can apply that then to our social issues and try to look at them and see what are the microscopic things that we didn't know were there. And I think it's more about remapping and magnifying or coming back out rather than religion will save us from technology. I think it's, yeah, that would be my response there.
Yeah, don't let my mistranslation of his point stop on, I think. Understood. Yeah, there's a cosmological framing issue that seems to be behind the way that this stuff has run out of our completely off the rails. Right.
Anyway, thanks, you all. I don't know if you'll want to respond to last response. Nope. Nope.
I thank you all for sitting with this twice in a row. There was a ton of stuff actually we got to in the first conversation that we didn't get to this time in particular. Stuff about fugitivity and being a migrant in a world that is under such an intense burden as going through such transformations. Megan, I know I'll have you back on soonish.
Maybe we can explore that together. I don't know. Closing thoughts, folks. Obviously, weird studies is awesome.
Megan's papers are wonderful. Thank you. Yeah. Thanks for having us on here.
Thanks for coming back, Jeff and Phil. Thank you for agreeing to the to the redo and thanks, Michael, for making it all possible. It was a pleasure to talk to you. It was great to meet you, Megan.
I look forward to our conversation developing in the future. Yes, like the dark future and Phil. I'll be seeing you very soon. In the awful dark future.
And Phil, I would love. The awful dark future that is JF's class. That is a red future. Phil, if you could please put me in touch with your cybernetic PhD student.
Absolutely. Sure she would like to talk to you. Okay. Yeah.
Thanks. Take care. Thanks. Thanks again for listening.
I stayed up until 3am on Christmas morning getting these show notes complete for this. So please hop on over to Patreon or Substack and Go Scope, the syllabus of all the awesome stuff we mentioned in this episode. And if you'd like to dig into the new album I mentioned, that LPA, the Age of Reunion, is now exclusively available to my paying monthly supporters. I'm not exactly sure when I will put it out.
I'm looking for label support at this time, but it would be my deep pleasure to share the fruits of 21 years of writing and production with you. I hope you enjoy. And in the spirit of Christmas, if you truly are broke but would still like to hear it, drop me a line and I'm happy to send you a private link. Good tidings to you and we'll be back in the new year with many more wonderful conversations.